Is There An Opportunity To Be Investing In Water?

Summary:As a basic necessity for human life on earth,
there are always potential opportunities for investing in water. This
page has been written for us by the editorial team at
TotallyDrinkable.com
in December 2009, we hope you find it to be interesting and useful.

With water being essential to us all, there has always been and
will always be the potential to make consistent profits from this
resource. However, with the preventative costs of
climate change looming large, and the advancing requirements of a rapidly increasing
global population, the opportunities may not be so clear-cut.

As an essential resource, the utility companies that supply our
water are mostly well regulated. Within geographic areas, utility
companies usually have a monopoly over supply, meaning that we 'the
consumer' need to be protected from unfair price rises.

While the profits being made by these companies has historically
been above average, they will need major assistance from governments in
the coming years if they are to be able to assist society as we need.

With temperatures rising in some parts of the world, there is new and additional strain being made on available water supplies whilst in other areas, deforestation is having terrible impacts on local populations as both their supply and quality of water is falling.

These changes are forcing new techniques and strategies to deal
with these challenges. For example, some parts of the world - Cyprus
comes to mind - are now using desalination technology
to supply a substantial portion of their clean drinking water.

But this is not all, seawater is having a greater impact on many
millions of people worldwide as storm surges and floods are increasing
in both frequency and strength. Events that were once occurring every
100 or more years are now happening twice per decade!

This adds dramatically to the requirements of utility companies
since their - often - old and outdated drainage systems are unable to
cope and need updating. The cost to update and replace the drain system
for an entire city can often be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is a price that current water companies and shareholders are simply
unable to bare.

All this means that governments now have to consider legislation
for the water industry much more seriously - our futures depend upon it!
For example, the EU has in place two separate
water directives
to provide guidance to EU Member States in the hope that best practices can be shared and improved throughout the Union.

Of course, this does not mean that there is no investment
opportunity in water, far from it. These new trends and changes almost
certainly mean that some entrepreneurs will become very wealthy! But it
does mean that more government assistance is needed and that we as
taxpayers need to accept a greater responsibility for the supplies on
which we depend.

Once again, we would like to thank TotallyDrinkable.com for sending us these thoughts.

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